


Bring Down the Walls

by Megalohdon



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bloodswap, M/M, Maroon!Karkat, Teal!Sollux, cops and robbers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-01
Updated: 2015-10-01
Packaged: 2018-04-24 05:53:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4907857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Megalohdon/pseuds/Megalohdon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A troublesome and mischievous Karkat Megido has gotten himself into Solitary Confinement under the guise of 'violent and ruthless barbarian', when in all honesty he just wants his favorite officer to be the one subjected to scrubbing his grimy, sweaty face every day after twenty four hours of causing mayhem in his cell. In a more intimate moment of two people on the opposite sides of the law, they both lower their guard long enough to learn more about each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bring Down the Walls

**Author's Note:**

> Birthday gift for my dear friend Red! An AU of our two characters (My Teal Sollux, his Maroon Karkat) in a "Cops and Robbers" situation. Thank you Red for being fantastic and helping me when I needed it, and I hope you have an awesome birthday.

Repugnant.

The word of the day is repugnant. Shirt sleeves were rolled up, his right hand balled into a tight fist around an unwitting sponge as the left loosely holds a pail of soap and water. A part of him knows why he’s in here. Why he’s the one sanctioned to this job while the rest of the department laughs on. The barking giggles from behind the locked cell door were calls of warning, vague threats veiled by madness and delusions of grandeur. The teal blood with no dignity left to lose was the only man on the force who the prisoner would willingly co-operate with. 

Much to his own dismay.

An olive-blooded colleague snickers, taking out her own set of keys to unlock the cell to allow the tallest of their pair inside. She hesitates for a moment before pushing the cell open, and he wastes no time shuffling inside with a droll look of dismay and disgust on his features. Hours of sleeplessness etched eternal worry lines beneath his sunken eyes, and the chair across from the caged maroon-blooded delinquent is almost too inviting for his weary muscles.

Unfortunately, he’s far too tired about surrendering himself to the comforts of a chair, if only for a few minutes. The resident trouble maker hastily shuffles over to his own empty chair, awkwardly shifting in the strait jacket binding himself together snugly. 

It was for his own safety.

A quiet, mental reminder floating through his sea of thoughts. A sailboat on the open ocean of uncertainty with a lumbering storm of insomnia, threatening to throw the captain overboard sooner or later. The bucket and sponge both make a comfortable home between his firmly planted feet, and the tired officer takes a brief moment to look over the beaming prisoner sitting right in front of him.

“Megido,” he pushes past gritted teeth, left hand already dipping down into the warm, welcoming waters to grab for the sponge waiting to be subjected to the job of cleaning up this animal. Like clockwork his ears flick forwards, lips breaking apart in a grin that puts a Cheshire cat to shame as he hums out a low, “Yes?”

“You know why I’m here, right?”

“Not a date, unfortunately, I’m guessing.”

“Well,” the teal blood sighs, both hands wringing out the sponge halfway so it wasn’t dripping all over his cell floor, “You’re not technically wrong. But still not right. Try again.” The laugh that barks out is an all too familiar sound of hesitance, but he leans forward and jerks his chin up with nary a sound of disgust, “At least you like me enough to clean up your mess.”

“Not really my mess if you’re the one getting in to trouble, is it?” A thin brow raised, and the sponge holding hand reaches up to carefully start washing behind the other’s ear, “You brought me in, officer. Until I get out, I’m going to be your mess.”

There’s a certain leering purr to his voice, and with a sneer the cop gives him a pointed glare before getting back to the task at hand. The shorter of the two remained undeterred. “Officer Captor, can I ask you a question?”

“If I say no, are you going to ask it anyways?”

“Absolutely, yes.”

“Then go for it,” he sighs, pressing hard behind Karkat’s ear before withdrawing the sponge and submerging it back in the water for another round of “expunge the dirt and soak in the clean water”. There’s a quiet sound of protest when Sollux withdraws his hand, but the sharp sound of sparks in warning keeps him from saying anything about it. “Do you ever think about letting me go? Like, whenever you’re called out to the scene and you find me there, do you ever just want to let me get away? Or hope I’m not there when you arrive?”

He pauses for a moment, pupilless eyes wavering over the worn out features of the serial arsonist and he takes a few minutes to really consider this question. Despite his moral compass, there are larger parts of him that just wants to let him go. Let him get out and live his life. The most he is would be considered a menace to society, but no one gets hurt and nothing illegal is distributed in the shadows or under the shaking streetlights of the more sketchy parts of town.

No one deserves to be punished for serving out a death sentence to the fullest capacity someone possibly can. The only crime, in the eyes of the worn out, tired officer who only wanted to stay behind a computer and make sure their mainframes stayed running, the other ever committed was exist. And even then, that wasn’t his fault. Sollux could never hold that against him. No one asks to be shoved into the lower end of the Hemospectrum. A blurred line of who had the hatchright to get out of any crime they committed, and a vague understanding that no one was worth anything unless the heart beating in the hollow cavity of their chest was as cold and dark as the unfathomable depths of the sea.

“Sometimes,” he concludes, a surprising warmth from him in the presence of honesty, and the warmblood takes this to heart. A quiet appreciation of the verbal smile he can hear pushing past those tired barriers. At least he’s getting somewhere, “I can’t, though. Being an asshole isn’t really a crime, but lighting abandoned buildings on fire just to get us to pick you up doesn’t prove anything. I can’t let you walk, even if sometimes I wish you would.” A brief silence broken by the sound of dripping water, a reminder of why they’re both here right now.

Of why he’s there in that moment. 

Karkat dips his face back down this time, closing his eyes in quiet hopes of affection from the other as the officer begrudgingly moves forward to press the sponge to his brow. Thick patches of hair instinctively knit together defensively, relaxing as he carefully wipes the beading sweat off his forehead. Black bags weigh down tired eyes, and the worn brain screams endlessly and pounds relentlessly against the barrier of the skull, but it questions. It pushes forth budding curiosity, encourages questions and thirsts for answers and information it has no business knowing. A familiar howl of attention and attention from the uniformed man bent over a bucket with a sponge in his hand.

Humiliating.

“Can I ask you a question back? Seems like a good way to pass the time.”

A loud splash welcomes the sponge back, two sopping hands dip back under the surface of the water to wring out a day’s worth of screaming and self-loathing. As much as he makes a show out of being in solitary isolation due to guard attacks, the teal blooded captor of the prisoner knew much more about how he felt than he let on. Karkat doesn’t seem to inquire about the sudden interrogation, just an eager flick of his tail as the sun beams out through the cracks between his teeth. He beamed at any point in his life, and the Gemini was half convinced he had taken a chunk out of the sun himself and grinned enough to show it off. A worse crime than anything, but asinine if he were to claim it as such. Clever indeed.

He brings the sponge back up to the scuffed features of the bound man seated in front of him, a quiet hum echoing in his rattling chest as the other sits on the presented question. Sollux wasn’t in any position to ask him anything officially anyways. Personal curiosity wasn’t illegal, however, and seeing as he was washing this man on a daily basis now it was only fair to get some sort of compensation on the other’s end, “Hit me, babe.”

A grimace, almost verbal, twists the gentle features of the taller male, but he carefully presses the sponge to the lid of the Cancer’s left eye and allows himself to show a bitten back sense of irritation, “Don’t tempt me,” he warns first, eyes trained on the right, opened eye as Karkat grins wider and shrugs helplessly, “Can I ask for the story on what happened to your,” he hesitates, withdrawing the sponge enough to ghost it over the larger scar crossing his robust features he wore so proudly, “face. Scar wise. Sorry.”

The dropped ears and change of posture causes Captor to withdraw completely, apologies written in the worry lines on his brow as his company mulls over his ability to turn down this question. It’s completely voluntary, no legal structure binding him to giving Sollux an answer. He doesn’t need one, but the curiosity burns in the pit of his stomach, and like anyone with nary three hours of sleep in the past four days would make anyone drop their cognitive wall and let thoughts flow on their own.

“You can, I guess. Why do you want to know, first off?”

Taking the defensive position on this one was his best chance of assuring that he was doing the right thing by humoring the question presented him. The officer doesn’t protest, it was in his right, after all, to go about the answer however he pleased. With a somber glance down at his feet he dunks the sponge again and rinses out the worries of yesterday. The fears of tomorrow. The uncertainty of the day after. “Curiosity, I guess. It’s rather large, so I could guess a bar fight. But that would be on your record, and it wouldn’t look like this. You wouldn’t get into a bar much younger than a sweep or two ago.” A careful shrug and the limp sponge threatens to fall from his grasp right back down into the welcoming grasp of the chilling water as the Maroon-Blooded captive mulls this answer over.

A quiet, vague admittance into having tried to solve the riddle on his own. He spent an embarrassing amount of time with Megido as it was, mulling over his file and discarded record was the last thing he needed to be getting out to anyone, let alone the man of the hour. “Personal research? Damn, you really do have a soft spot for little ol’ me.”

“Don’t push it, Megido, and don’t even begin to overthink it.”

“Fine, fine.” He raises his shoulders as much as he can. Those tired teal eyes can almost visualize that motion motioning into a full blown surrendering gesture. Defeatist, he won’t push anymore on that one, and the officer takes what he can get with the other’s limitations on his own body movement. “If you really want to know, you were close to right. I guess. I took a bottle to the face.” A thin brow is raised at that one, and the sponge that was gently cleansing the right cheek of the speaker’s face is retracted for a moment so the one holding it could make brief eye contact, “So a vague bar fight?”

The snicker that pushes past dull fangs that existed purely for false threats with smiles almost shakes a hollow shiver down the spine of the cooler blooded troll. Haunting, and that’s exactly what he wanted. There’s a sparking fire in his eyes, a burning heat of loathing when he makes that second of eye contact before relaxing his shoulders and leaning forward again.

“No, sadly. Fuck, I wish it was,” he trails, biting his lip in thought before directing his attention back to the clenching forearm of the officer carefully minding to his face, “Foster parent incident, I guess, is a more appropriate thing to call it. Asshole smashed a bottle against my face and that’s how I decided that a dumpster in an alleyway was a much more suitable living situation for me than wherever the fuck I was at during the incident.”

It’s almost, if not is, impossible to trace the movements of those two dull orbs functioning as the eyes for the troll in front of him. They seem focused on the spot that he’s cleaning, which at that moment in time happened to be his jaw and neck, but he very well could have trained them on his own two burning embers without his knowledge. The suspicion was enough to let the hairs of his neck stand on edge, ready for that sponge to graze over top of them mercifully. “You didn’t call it in? What prompted them to do that, actually, if that’s okay?” 

A sharp snort defiantly protests that first question for the moment, and instead that goat eared boy who was more trouble than he should have been threw a laugh across the room and brought it right back with one long inhale. Sollux very well told the funniest joke of the century and he didn’t even know it at the time. “Right, anyway. It’s not hard to piss of a drunk. Rampant alcohol soaked brain and my penchant for starting shit caught up with me. It was a while ago, I was eleven. I think he told me to take the trash out or something. I know I didn’t want to do it, and I protested the hell out of it. No real specifics on how we got to that point other than I didn’t do what he asked, and already drunk for the night he smashed the bottle across my head to,” at this moment he shakes his torso as much as he can and sighs, biting back a quite curse before he continued, “teach me a lesson or something. You can picture the air quotes there if you want. I don’t care.

“Bottle smashed against my horn, the swipe went across my face and left that bad boy. Force of the bottle broke my nose which just started the foundation for that plateau of a schnoz I’ve got going on,” another sharp laugh, as if he took that ‘reigning champion of cell humor’ title for his own, and he closes his eyes for Captor to start on that side of his face, “I got pissed off. Wasn’t going to sit there and wait for that to happen again so I just. Left. I didn’t have proper medical treatment, but I knew some stuff. I cleaned and bandaged the gash the best I could. If I had gone to a hospital I think it would be bearable to look at now but unfortunately I definitely screwed the metaphorical pooch on that one.”

The man in uniform drops the sponge one final time back into the cooled bucket, and he takes the moment to look over Karkat’s features with a sigh under his breath, “You never thought to go back?”

“Not really. No one came to look for me, so I took at as no one was missing me. As far as I was concerned I had better things to do than to dig my way back to a place no one cared that I left to begin with. I’ve been on my own since I was eleven, and I’ve been running ever since.” 

In an uncharacteristically gentle fashion, Sollux reaches a still dripping hand out to cup the warm-blood’s face, thumb softly running over jagged, smoothed scarring along his darkened, worn out face, “Maybe if you stopped running long enough you’ll either find someone to help slow you down, or you’ll figure out someone was chasing after you all along. Either way,” he grunts, withdrawing his hand from the taut face of the quietly shocked maroon blood and opts to take the pail in his left hand again, and makes his retreat towards the door, “You’re missing a lot keeping that up.”

The rapping of his knuckles alerts the olive blood from earlier that he was done, and before he hears that sweet click of the lock release, Karkat pipes up with one last word of advice, “Officer if you ever want to stop giving a damn about the pointless shit in life and want to have some fun, I would be honored to let you drop the match next time.”

No response, no acknowledgement. He walks out of the cell once the door pulls open without so much as a glance backwards, and once it clicks shut again that never-ending echo of loneliness settles in, and the cool contrasting touch of his hand to the Cancer’s cheek still resonates on the surface of his softened flesh.

Maybe solitary isn’t so bad after all.


End file.
